1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a testing system and a testing method for a link control card (LCC), and particularly to a testing system and testing method for testing work reliability of the LCC.
2. General Background
With the development of information technology, a magnetic disc array is more and more popularly used for various application systems in enterprises. The magnetic disc array provides an additive enclosure storage device for extending storage capacity of a single host or server, and is connected to the host by a small computer system interface (SCSI) or other interfaces. The magnetic disc array is used in storage area networks (SANs) by means of a fiber channel interface, for sharing storage capacities among a plurality of hosts. The magnetic disc array with fiber channel adopts the fiber channel technology and has a fiber channel interface connected to the magnetic disc array's exterior such as a host, with fiber channel technology in it's interior.
Presently, a conventional fiber channel storage device includes two LCCs, a middle plane (MP), a magnetic disc array having fifteen hard disk drives (HDDs), and two power supplies. In a testing procedure of the fiber channel storage device, a host transmits commands and fiber channel signals to the magnetic disc array via a host bus adaptor (HBA) to do reading and writing testing of the LCCs.
However, the foregoing testing method is not able to test functioning of the LCCs across a marginal voltage range: when supply voltages of each of the LCCs are 5 V and 2.5 V, each of the LCCs are tested at a range, for example, from 4.75 to 5.25 V and from 2.375 to 2.625 V , thus discovering if the fiber channel signals that each of the LCCs transmits may be distorted when operating near but not at the rated voltages.
What is needed is a low cost testing system and testing method for readily testing operation of an LCC of a storage device across a voltage range.